The present work deals with the development of an innovative approach to the weight estimation in the conceptual design of a Hybrid-Electric-Powered (HEP) Blended Wing Body (BWB) commercial aircraft. In the last few decades, the improvement of the environmental impact of civil aviation has been the major concern of the aeronautical engineering community, in order to guarantee the sustainable development of the system in presence of a constantly growing market demand. The sustained effort in the improvement of the overall efficiency of conventional aircraft has produced a new generation of vehicles with an extremely low level of emissions and noise, capable of covering the community requirements in the short term. Unfortunately, the remarkable improvements achieved represent the asymptotic limit reachable through the incremental enhancement of existing concepts. Any further improvement to conform to the strict future environmental target will be possible only through the introduction of breakthrough concepts. The aeronautical engineering community is thus concentrating the research on unconventional airframes, innovative low-noise technologies, and alternative propulsion systems. The BWB is one of the most promising layouts in terms of noise emissions and chemical pollution. The further reduction of fuel consumption that can be achieved with gas/electric hybridisation of the power-plant is herein addressed in the context of multidisciplinary analyses. In particular, the payload and range limits are assessed in relation to the technological development of the electric components of the propulsion system. The present work explores the potentialities of an energy-based approach for the initial sizing of a HEP unconventional aircraft in the early conceptual phase of the design. A detailed parametric analysis has been carried out to emphasise how payload, range, and degree of hybridisation are strictly connected in terms of feasible mission requirements and related to the reasonable expectations of development of electric components suitable for aeronautical applications.

This paper presents an investigation of the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic interaction of propellers for distributed electric propulsion applications. The rationale underlying the research is related to the key role that aeroacoustics plays in the establishment of the future commercial aviation scenario. The sustainable development of airborne transportation system is currently constrained by community noise, which limits the operations of existing airports and prevents the building of new ones. In addition, the substantial saturation of the existing noise abatement technologies inhibits the further development of the existing fleet, and imposes the adoption of disruptive configurations in terms of airframe layout and propulsion technology. Simulation-based data may help in clarifying many aspects related to the acoustic impact of such innovative concepts. Blended-wing-body equipped with distributed electric propulsion is one of the most promising, due to the beneficial effect of the substantial shielding induced by its geometry. Nevertheless, the novelty of the layout requires a thorough investigation of specific aspect for which no previous experience is available. Herein, the interaction between propellers is analysed for a fixed propeller geometry, as a function of their mutual distance and compared to the acoustic pattern of the isolated one. The aerodynamic results have been obtained using a boundary integral formulation for unsteady, incompressible, potential flows which accounts for the interaction between free wakes and propellers. For the aeroacoustic analyses, the Farassat 1A boundary integral formulation for the solution of the Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings equation has been used. These results provide an insight into the minimum distance between propellers to avoid aerodynamic/aeroacoustic interaction effects, which is an important starting point for the development of distributed propulsion systems.

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The present work deals with the multiobjective, multidisciplinary optimisation of takeoff and approach operations of a commercial aircraft aimed at the mitigation of the impact of aviation noise on the population. The innovative approach used here couples the minimisation of the aircraft noise level at the certification points with the improvement of the sound quality. The latter objective represents the main novelty of the present work and is addressed using a spectral–matching approach to make the aircraft noise as close as possible to a target sound. The rationale underlying the research is the development of a community–oriented approach to the assessment airport operations in view of the complete redefinition of the future airport scenarios. Indeed, the air traffic growth, the rapid expansion of urban areas around airports, and the expected advent of urban air mobility, are transforming the aviation noise into a serious hazard to the sustainable development of society. The sound–quality–based objective imposes a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach also in the procedural optimisation, due to the detail required to estimate the noise spectrum composition. Two merit factors are minimised, specifically the EPNL at the noise certification points and the Lp –norm of the difference between the noise produced by the configuration under analysis and a target sound. The target sounds are obtained by using sound engineering techniques aimed at the sound quality improvement, on the basis of the results of the psychometric tests campaigns performed within the projects SEFA and COSMA. The minimisation is achieved adopting a global evolution method, and the results are presented in terms of approximated Pareto frontiers for a single–aisle aircraft in both takeoff and landing conditions.

Space-coiling metamaterials that exploit the so-called generalized Snell's law are suitable for the subwavelength manipulation of acoustic waves, leading to extraordinary refracting and reflecting metasurfaces. Typically, space-coiling metasurfaces are characterized by a narrow operating range in frequency due to the intrinsic connection between the design wavelength and the characteristic dimensions of the metasurface. The main goal of the present work is to design a broadband and modular space-coiling based metasurface, extending the range of frequency where the effective metabehaviour is achieved. The metasurface building set is composed by eight different unit cells, each introducing a tailored phase shift in the field, that can be combined side by side to produce the desired acoustic effect. The design parameters of each cell are selected as the result of an optimization process that minimizes the dependency on the operating frequency of the metabehaviour, keeping the overall thickness below a quarter of the design wavelength. Significant results are obtained for benchmark problems.

The optimal design methodologies in aeronautics are known to be constrained by the computational burden required by direct simulations. Due to this reason, the development of efficient metamodelling techniques represents nowadays an imperative need for the designers. In fact, surrogate models has been demonstrated to significantly reduce the number of high-fidelity evaluations, thus alleviating the computing effort. Over the last years, the aeronautical designers community has switched from a design approach predominantly based on direct simulations to an extensive use of metamodels. Recently, to further improve the efficiency, several dynamic approaches based on parameters self-tuning have been developed to support the metamodel construction. This work deals with the use of surrogate models based on Artificial Neural Network for the noise shielding of unconventional aircraft configurations. Here, the insertion loss field of the a Blended Wing Body is reproduced by means of advanced machine learning techniques. The relevant framework is the calculation of the noise emitted by innovative aircraft configurations by means of suitable corrections of existing well-assessed noise prediction tools. The self-tuning algorithm has demonstrated to be accurate and efficient, and the observed performance discloses the possibility to implement numerical strategies for the reliable and robust unconventional aircraft optimal design